The Calendar of Postiness

Saying Goodbye To Boca Burgers

May 12, 2007 — The Luigiian

There are times in your life when you know, absolutely, that you do not deserve what you get. One of those times is when you’re about to graduate from high school, and you cannot accurately or consistently answer questions from “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” The other time is when you go to a party and something bad happens. Neither of those happened to me today (because I am badass), but I know many of you feel this way, because you are not as smart as I am, because I am the greatest human being that has ever walked the earth, excepting Dave Barry, who makes a living via writing about weasels. For those of you who feel that way, I have a story to tell. About myself. About girls. And, of course, about Boca Burgers.

Today I went to a friend’s graduation party. It was wonderful, the sort of party that Ronald Reagan dreamt of, with parents and friends and a cake and presents and high school graduates and many, many vegetarians. It was a good party, one with many presents for the Graduation Girl, one of which included a brand-new Ford Mustang from 2004. And I got to see it all.

Well, not necessarily all, now that you mention it. I came at four, and I left at six, because we were to see “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”, wherein we got to see a man lose $975,000 in a span of about five minutes. It was a sad thing, really, because he was a Yale graduate. I would have preferred to see him lose more. Damn rich white people.

But anyway, so before that, I had gone to Gardunio’s, a wonderful restaurant, which is called the “Margarita Factory”. It has oodles of old, rusted-looking pipes that seem to connect to massive containers presumably containing margarita ingredients like salt and tequila, and possibly those little worms you get in the tequila, and these pipes reminded me of why I will never drink. It just seemed so unsanitary. I think the Health Board should fine the restaurant, not for actually putting such ingredients in the tanks, but because they were being pretentious for actually thinking this was a wonderful architectural feature rather than proof positive that an architect should never actually drink margaritas while designing a restaurant that serves margaritas.

There I met an old friend, Kori, whose name I could never really remember until now but who always played a mean guitar back in my junior year at the School of Three-Thousand Packed-In Holding Inmates. He was a waiter at the restaurant. He will be going to the School of Twenty-Five Thousand Hippies Either Buying Or Selling Marijuana (namely, the University of New Mexico), just like I will. I don’t think (think) he has ever smoked marijuana (street name “Wacky Tobbackee”) but everybody else probably will have. I know I won’t have, in spite of this blog’s appearances.

I slept for an hour at home. This is important, because I typically stay up till four in the morning, meaning that by afternoon I feel as if I have been hit by a bus. And, so, as I went to my friend Samantha’s graduation party, I felt rested and fearful, the kind of fear you get when you are in love or when you are afraid to go to somebody’s graduation party because you think that everyone hates you. I was afraid because I knew my pastor would be there, and so would Boca burgers, and both are dangerous. You don’t want to be cornered in a dark alley by a pastor, ever, because with only a small cross they can kill most Satanic creatures which live upon our world, a concept illustrated by The Exorcist.

Not that I am, in fact, Satanic. And, of course, you probably aren’t either, I think. And, so, maybe we have nothing to fear from pastors. Maybe. But I’m still going to be wary.

But anyway, when I got to the party, it was as crazy as a party with absolutely no alcohol can possibly get, meaning that the “teenagers” played Cranium, while the adults sat around and talked. And then we had the burgers, which are something only a pastor can stop from unleashing their evil upon the Earth.

Because pastor Mark was at the party, I decided it was safe to eat one. It definitely tasted better than the hamburger patties they serve at school, which are made of cow, and which (of course) taste like cow patties. They also tasted far better than McDonald’s hamburgers, which I think are made of the rats that scurry about under the cases of McRib sandwiches from the food’s inaugural launch in 1989. In other words, they were pretty good, at least as good as a soy-based patty designed to look like a hamburger can get. If I had tried one of the regular burgers, I probably couldn’t have told the difference.

I began to say my goodbyes only a quarter-way through the burger. They were terse and bittersweet: shaking hands; trying to hug a girl who didn’t like me and said she couldn’t shake my hand because she had sticky stuff on it and then attempted to hit me when I tried to hug her; trying to shake a guy’s hand and having him tell me it was against his religion; and so on. I didn’t have a yearbook, but that didn’t matter, because it was probably against the guy’s religion.

As I left, I decided to keep the Boca Burger as a memento of the party, but then, of course, I remembered that they are of Satan, and the only thing that had kept the forces of evil from penetrating my colon was the presence of Pastor Mark. I contemplated what the burger could do to me; would I have Mark sprinkle holy water on it? Would he laugh at me, like everybody does when I tell them the truth about things? I didn’t know what to do, but then Samantha came to the rescue.

“Here, I’ll take that and throw it away for you,” she said, in her characteristic sweetheart voice. So I gave it to her, and I hugged her, and I left, and then I presume that she threw it into the fiery depths of hell from whence it came.

It was hard to say goodbye to that Boca Burger. Even if it was from Hell, it was a memento, one of the last things I will have to remember from my salad days in high school. It will, of course, be hard to say goodbye to Samantha and my friends, too. I will miss them, especially if they do not go to the University of Twenty-Five Thousand Hippies Either Buying Or Selling Marijuana with me. Even if they do, will they not eventually blend in with all of the others, becoming part of the faceless tribe of the twenty-five thousand wearing tie-dye T-shirts? Or will they remain who they always were? They have all been wonderful to me, even when I couldn’t remember their name or what I was supposed to take to school that was worth a thousand points for both myself and their team. They are individuals, they are people, good people, not Damned Rich White People, and not Satanic.